“We grow up to believe that we are supposed to somehow become who we are meant to be through the trial-by-fire that is life here on planet Earth. Reality is...there s no becoming . It s actually all an un-becoming , only to reunite with who you were born to be in the first place before society told you otherwise.”
“I want to make it perfectly clear that although I believe in the continuity of existence, I do not hold to the simplistic theory that upon death a vaporous ghost containing our soul floats out of our dead body and goes to some cosmic waiting room while a karmic committee tallies up our unfulfilled needs and desires and matches us up with two unsuspecting fools who deserve the hell that we will put them through as much as we deserve the hell they will put us through. I am very confident, however, in the cycles of nature, and I do not see any reason to believe that the same cyclic behavior we observe in the universe around us cannot apply to consciousness and the continuity of our existence. Perhaps, because of the fragile nature of time, we are living all our incarnations simultaneously.”
“Reade drew a deep breath. He said with resignation, All right. I ll try to explain. But it s rather difficult. You see, I ve devoted my life to the problem of why certain men see visions. Men like Blake and Boehme and Thomas Traherne. A psychologist once suggested that it s a chemical in the bloodstream—the same sort of thing that makes a dipsomaniac see pink elephants. Now obviously, I can t accept this view. But I ve spent a certain amount of time studying the action of drugs, and taken some of them myself. And it s become clear to me that what we call ordinary consciousness is simply a special, limited case. . . But this is obvious after a single glass of whiskey. It causes a change in consciousness, a kind of deepening. In ordinary consciousness, we re mainly aware of the world around us and its problems. This is awfully difficult to explain. . . Fisher said, You re being very clear so far. Please go on. Perhaps an analogy will help. In our ordinary state of consciousness, we look out from behind our eyes as a motorist looks from behind the windscreen of a car. The car is very small, and the world out there is very big. Now if I take a few glasses of whiskey, the world out there hasn t really changed, but the car seems to have grown bigger. When I look inside myself, there seem to be far greater spaces than I m normally aware of. And if I take certain drugs, the car becomes vast, as vast as a cathedral. There are great, empty spaces. . . No, not empty. They re full of all kinds of things—of memories of my past life and millions of things I never thought I d noticed. Do you see my point? Man deliberately limits his consciousness. It would frighten him if he were aware of these vast spaces of consciousness all the time. He stays sane by living in a narrow little consciousness that seems to be limited by the outside world. Because these spaces aren t just inhabited by memories. There seem to be strange, alien things, other minds. . . As he said this, he saw Violet de Merville shudder. He said, laughing, I m not trying to be alarming. There s nothing fundamentally horrible about these spaces. One day we shall conquer them, as we shall conquer outer space. They re like a great jungle, full of wild creatures. We build a high wall around us for safety, but that doesn t mean we re afraid of the jungle. One day we shall build cities and streets in its spaces.”
“Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.”
“Language is the alchemy of transforming a thought into a word, and the word into a new reality.”
“The only abyss that exists is the demonic sphere of consciousness created by the erroneous ideas and beliefs of the collective ego.”
“...is impossible to specify what [consciousness] is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.”
“When we live with Integrity every word, thought and action springs from the Intelligence of the Heart and flows in harmony, enlightened by the pure light of Consciousness.”
“There is a difference between having your own movement and cutting yourself off politically from all other movements. This last form of feminist isolationism is attractive in its simplicity. It appears to offer an option which implies that you concentrate on your own struggle and wait for some absolute future when men and women have progressed towards equality. It is of course a profoundly liberal utopian notion. ‘Progress’ is seen as some kind of single linear advance towards a goal. There is no sense of a movement living and working in history, learning though a dialectical interaction of its own efforts in objective circumstances. It forgets that the consciousness of particular groups amongst the oppressed is only partial. While this consciousness must be realized and expressed in their own movement, if the attempt is not continually to extend and connect this partial consciousness to the experience of other oppressed groups, it cannot politicize itself in a revolutionary sense. It becomes locked within its own particularism.”
“A misbegotten hatchling of consciousness, a birth defect of our species, imagination is often revered as a sign of vigor in our make-up. But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings. Denied nature’s exemption from creativity, we are indentured servants of the imaginary until the hour of our death, when the final harassments of imagination will beset us.”
“Looking for consciousness in the brain is like looking inside a radio for the announcer”
“If we are part of nature, then we are synonymous with it at the metaphysical level, every bit as much as the first all-but-inorganic animalcules that ever formed a chain of themselves in the blow hole of a primordial sea vent. There is no magic rod that comes down three hundred thousand years ago and divides our essence from the material world that produced us. This means that we cannot speak in essential terms of nature—neither of its brutality nor of its beauty—and hope to say anything true, if what we say isn’t true of ourselves. The importance of that proposition becomes clear only when it’s reversed: What’s true of us is true of nature. If we are conscious, as our species seems to have become, then nature is conscious. Nature became conscious in us, perhaps in order to observe itself. It may be holding us out and turning us around like a crab does its eyeball. Whatever the reason, that thing out there, with the black holes and the nebulae and whatnot, is conscious. One cannot look in the mirror and rationally deny this. It experiences love and desire, or thinks it does. The idea is enough to render the Judeo-Christian cosmos sort of quaint. As far as Rafinesque was concerned, it was just hard science. That part is mysterious. “She lives her life not as men or birds,” said Rafinesque, “but as a world.”
“The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides.”
“Life is like a game - we should be curious to play it - you explore and learn and grow - that is what it is for - that and having fun. It all expands consciousness- your own, the collective, and the cosmic.”
“As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, “You’re going to die, you know.” However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity.”
“Suddenly I realized that a cell s life is controlled by the physical and energetic environment and not by its genes. Genes are simply molecular blueprints used in the construction of cells, tissues, and organs. The environment serves as a contractor who reads and engages those genetic blueprints and is ultimately responsible for the character of a cell s life. It is a single cell s awareness of the environment, not its genes, that sets into motion the mechanisms of life.”
“If you happen to hold that human consciousness is no more than the epiphenomenon, or secretion, of our individual brains then you are more or less trapped in your own skull. But if consciousness is open, if it can partake in a more global form of being, if it can merge with the natural world and with other beings, then, indeed, it may be possible to drop, for a time, the constraints of one s personal worldview and see reality through the eyes of others.”